Friday, December 28, 2012

Have you seen something like this in your travels around the interweb?

What time is that in the yellow highlighted area, you say? 12 p.m.? As in, 12 post meridian? How can 12 be post meridian when 12 is the meridian?

I understand that computers can't deal with the reality that noon and midnight are not part of a mechanistic construction of time, and using the 24-hour clock that underlies how time is managed by computers makes it all obsolete. 24-hour time is much more logical, after all.

But this example was written by a person who thinks that 12:00 p.m. is the same as 12:00 noon. My sense is that noon as p.m. is the more common way to assign the meridians, rather than having 12:00 p.m. signifying midnight.

Who decided that 12:00 p.m. was noon instead of midnight? It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe it's a glass half-full/empty, optimist/pessimist test.

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Third of four daughters, raised in a rural area outside of a small town. Now living in a moderately large city, making media and immersed in other people's media. Finally cleaning out the filing cabinet and loading its contents to the cloud.